Tense and Aspect in L3 Interlanguage. The Effect of Lexical Aspect and Discourse Grounding on the Development of Tense and Aspect Marking in L3 Italian

This study presents the results of analyses carried out on written narra- tives (N = 103), collected from university learners of L3 Italian, designed to exam- ine the effect of lexical aspect and discourse grounding on past tense marking in L3 Italian. The analyses reveal that, contrary to the predictions of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis, these two factors do not reach their high- est degree of influence during early stages of language acquisition. The interlan- guage of low proficiency learners does not show the effects of lexical aspect or discourse grounding. On the contrary, the effect of both lexical aspect and discourse grounding increases with higher proficiency.